Altered Reality

by Eliza Green

  ‘I’m sorry, this is what the ESC is ordering me to do. It’s not you,’ Simon had explained. ‘They’re paranoid about a lot of things at the moment. I’m sure you can understand.’

  ‘Not really,’ Bill replied frankly. ‘Before I returned home, I was briefed about everything that went on. Now, they’re going to great lengths to keep me from the action.’

  ‘Listen, Bill’—Simon glanced over the monitor, presumably at the door, before moving his face closer to the screen—‘Do I really need to explain their behaviour to you?’

  It was the way he said it that caught Bill’s attention. His eyes narrowed. ‘If you know something, spill.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Simon shrugged. ‘Just one of Deighton’s temper tantrums, that’s all. You know how he gets.’

  Bill understood perfectly, but he’d worked with Simon long enough to know when he was hiding something. His travel curtailment had unsettled him more than he could let on to Simon Shaw. Moving around was a way for him to avoid his enemies. He had considered hiding out at the London ITF office indefinitely, but Simon had yet to call him in for assignment since his return from Washington D.C. two months ago.

  ‘I can’t keep doing these shit tasks for you. When are you going to call me in?’ Bill asked.

  Simon blinked rapidly. ‘Sorry. I can’t bring you in right now.’

  Confinement to his ITF apartment in London was torture. To offset the hemmed-in feeling, Bill split his time randomly between his ITF apartment and his privately owned Nottingham one and maxed out his travel privileges as often as he could.

  Eventually, the bullet train pulled away from the station; Bill sat staring out the window until it had reached its top speed of nearly eight hundred miles per hour. The lofty skyscrapers that disappeared into the low-hanging smog-filled clouds became just a blur. In the ten short weeks since he’d been back the atmosphere on Earth had got worse. People were struggling to breathe again, even with the new batch of gel masks.

  It was currently summer in the northern hemisphere and temperatures were cooler than they had been in the preceding year. As the temperature continued to fall and with an increase in migration from the Scandinavian countries, population overload in countries like Africa and South America was becoming a reality. On the ground, the situation was at breaking point. The extra numbers placed a higher demand on food, water and permanent shelter. Some areas inside the temporary housing neighbourhoods were turning into no-go zones as intolerance for migrants spread like a disease. Only four hundred million or so had been transferred to Exilon 5 since the programme began, not enough to relieve the conditions on Earth.

  The newsfeed on board the train showed the usual promotional video about the new planet. A new message scrolled across the bottom of the screen: ‘If you are having difficulty breathing, please arrange to have your gel mask checked.’ A number flashed up; Bill watched as several people scribbled it down.

  Bill, too, was finding it harder to catch his breath as each day passed. The air was heavy with noxious gases and high levels of carbon dioxide. The World Government was struggling to find companies that could make gel masks capable of adapting to the rapid changes in the atmosphere. With access to raw materials at an all-time low, companies had yet to replicate materials as useful or as pliable as the compound currently used to produce the masks.

  Another message scrolled across the screen: ‘Please refrain from making any unnecessary journeys. The World Government cannot guarantee your safety if you ignore this warning.’

  The bullet train was less busy than normal. More and more people were staying in the safety of their apartments where the artificial environment allowed them to breathe normally. There should have been more time to prepare the human transfers to Exilon 5, but the rate at which the atmosphere on Earth was deteriorating was gathering pace around the globe; the more preventative measures the government put in place, the quicker the atmosphere degraded. They were as powerless to contain the spread of the contaminated air particles as they’d have been if it was a viral disease.

  Bill sat bolt upright when he noticed an obelisk-shaped hunk of metal on wheels enter the carriage: the ticket autobot. Having forgotten where he had put his ticket, he fumbled about in his bag and then in his pocket. The ticketbot approached his position with its metal arms extended. Bill’s fingers touched something rectangular and he pulled his hands and the object out. His ticket fell onto the floor along with a black stone. The ticketbot was the first to notice the stone on the floor and retrieved it and the ticket with a set of metallic pincers. Bill held his breath when the ticketbot dangled the stone inches from his face. Shit. It was the communication stone that Stephen had given him.

  ‘Is this yours, sir?’ the ticketbot asked in its artificial tinny voice.

  ‘Umm, yes, thanks.’ Bill tried to grab the object but the machine held onto it. A red light that looked like a single eye scanned the object.

  ‘My scanners do not recognise its composition. What is it?’ The ticketbot’s wrist swivelled clockwise, then anticlockwise, as it scrutinised the item.

  Bill swallowed loudly and decided to be truthful. Since the bots were programmed to be analytical, there was little he could hide from it. ‘It’s a memento from Exilon 5.’

  A few other passengers turned round at the mention of the new planet. They, too, eyed the black stone curiously.

  The ticketbot handed the stone back. ‘I will never compute a human’s attachment to trivial things.’

  Bill feigned disinterest, shoving the stone into his bag as fast as he could, thankful that it looked so ordinary; the other passengers quickly lost interest. Warmth spread through his thumb as the ticketbot scanned his identity chip.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ it said, thrusting the ticket onto the table before moving on to the next passenger.

  When the ticketbot finally left the carriage, Bill went back to staring out the window. He wondered what would happen to the cities on Earth when the population finally transferred. Would the government try to salvage anything? The new trend was a worry, especially the reported rise in deaths across the world. People as young as eighty were dying from lung disease, usually unheard of in the medically advanced twenty-second century; eighty was barely middle-aged.

  Bill tuned into the promotional video that was playing on a loop on the screen: large neighbourhoods, dads playing catch with their sons, mothers picking flowers with their daughters. Bill was largely immune to the propaganda shown on public transport, Light Boxes, in the corridors of power and in apartment lobbies. It was easy for the government to sell their idealistic vision to a group of people who hadn’t experienced the problems of the new planet first hand. What people didn’t know was that traits of the ‘old’ world—of Earth—were becoming more evident on Exilon 5: city junkies, litter control, social detachment in favour of addictive technology.

  Now that Bill had seen evidence of the government’s more sinister activities, and what with Anton’s capture, he struggled to believe their main motive was to relocate the entire population of Earth to Exilon 5. Recently, there had been a change to the method of selection for the transfer process—what had previously been decided by lottery was now determined by genetics. The investigator in him told him to be vigilant; the only problem was he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. Any information about Anton was top secret; not even Gilchrist’s personal assistant could tell him anything about it.

  Bill reached inside his bag and pulled out the black communication stone, cradling it in the palm of his hand. It felt ordinary enough, with smooth rounded edges, but Bill knew its real power lay beneath its matt exterior. Stephen had explained that the stone might work over distance but only if he activated a similar one on Exilon 5—the natural properties of the gamma rock might help to amplify the range over distance—but he’d also warned Bill that they would need to modify one of the units in the tranquillity caves in District Three first. However, if Bill arrived on Exilon 5, the gamma
rock would most likely pick up the communication stone and guide him to the nearest district, although Stephen said they had never used the stones in this way before.

  Bill had come to accept that Stephen and the Indigenes were not his enemy. He thought about Isla’s letters and her mention of an Indigene contact. Would her contact have more answers? Stephen might know who it was—and it was a good place to start looking. He couldn’t trust the information contained in the World Government documents, even though there was plenty of truth in them.

  The black stone remained as passive as the day Stephen had given it to him. Since Stephen had not attempted to make contact, Bill had to assume the modifications were still underway. He followed Stephen’s warnings that the stone must remain a secret. If humans were to discover its underlying power, it could ignite a deeper interest in what lay beneath Exilon 5, where the Indigenes lived. Any kind of human excavation work would surely reveal the location of the tunnels and threaten their habitat. Frustrated, Bill shoved the stone back into his bag, his doubts that it possessed any special abilities growing each day it remained an ordinary lump of rock.

  An hour and fifteen minutes after leaving London King’s Cross, the bullet train pulled into Inverness, making light work of the nine hundred-mile journey. Bill pulled up the collar on his heavy coat, affixed his gel mask and slung his bag over his shoulder as he stepped out onto the platform. He hid his face beneath his baseball cap and made his way towards the nearest hotel, shouldering his way through the throngs of people. There, he rented a room for a couple of hours under a false identity.

  It was almost midday and Bill was sitting on the edge of the bed with his DPad in hand, two separate communication devices connected to the back, magnetically held in place. A secured communication stream was crucial to give him and Laura anonymity; by alternating between the two communication devices, he could mask their signatures and locations temporarily. While contact between them had been sporadic in the beginning, Laura had recently been using her own communication device more because of the ESC’s apparent lack of interest in her.

  Bill reduced the tint on the hotel room’s window and idly played with the stone while he waited. When the time hit 12:00, Bill activated the link using the DPad.

  ‘Hello?’ said Laura cautiously and quietly. She was sitting in a darkened room, the light of the DPad illuminating her pale, but pretty face, her ESC Level Five status instantly recognisable by the purple uniform she wore. Her blonde hair hung loose over her shoulders instead of being tied up in its usual ponytail. Bill preferred her hair down.

  ‘We need to meet,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Well hello to you too—and my mother’s fine, by the way. Recovered fully from her fall, thanks for asking,’ Laura quipped.

  ‘Sorry,’ Bill said. After their initial meeting, he had revealed a softer side to her that was in contrast to the man who’d almost killed her in a back alley in Sydney.

  Laura rubbed her eyes and yawned. ‘Never mind that. When do you want to meet?’

  ‘As soon as possible. The stone’s still inactive,’ Bill said, holding it up to the screen.

  ‘What do you propose we do?’

  ‘Well, I’m not prepared to sit around and wait for this thing to light up like a Christmas tree. Have you managed to find out where Anton is?’

  ‘No,’ Laura said. ‘I’ve tried everything. Somehow, they’ve managed to erase all reports about his capture. Either that, or they never recorded it in the first place.’

  ‘I haven’t been able to find anything out either. I feel like we’re being sent on a wild goose chase, while the real plan is being formulated. I think we should shift our focus. Isla’s letters indicated serious trouble ahead for the Indigenes. We have to take her at her word. We’ve done all we can here. Our priority now is to warn the Indigenes about the World Government’s interest in their second generation and hope that Anton lives to tell the tale.’

  ‘I hate the idea of giving up looking for Anton, but I agree. I don’t like that the government has changed its transfer tactics. Something’s definitely up. So, what are you suggesting?’ Laura asked.

  ‘We need to go to Exilon 5,’ Bill said. He’d come to this conclusion on the train; the World Government was deliberately confining him to the United Kingdom for a reason—to keep him away from what was really going on.

  Laura’s jaw dropped. ‘Are you serious?’ she screeched, surprising Bill so much he dropped the stone. He looked at the screen as he picked it up. Laura was grinning.

  ‘I take it this is a good suggestion?’ he said.

  ‘Do you know how long I’ve waited to go to Exilon 5?’ she said, frowning sternly at him to emphasise the seriousness of the question.

  ‘I’m guessing longer than we’ve known each other. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s only a suggestion. I don’t know if we can get off the planet without detection.’

  Laura leaned forward until her face filled the screen. Her pupils contracted. ‘At some point we have to take a leap of faith. If you take me to the new planet, I will do anything you ask. Anything.’

  ‘Anything?’ said Bill raising a single eyebrow, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

  Laura flushed crimson. ‘Within reason, Bill. I have standards,’ she said leaning back, but she couldn’t help returning his smile.

  ‘Don’t pin all your hopes and dreams on the new planet,’ Bill said turning serious. ‘It’s far from perfect.’

  ‘I know,’ said Laura, lowering her voice. ‘But I need to see it—more than you can understand. I’m sick of this seasonal depression controlling every aspect of my life.’

  Bill nodded. ‘Well then, I suggest we get moving as quickly as possible. Things are far too quiet here. Trouble’s brewing. I can feel it.’ DPad in hand, he stood up and paced the room. ‘We might get more answers on Exilon 5. We should do this A.S.A.P.’

  Laura nodded. ‘You know, they’ve begun to reroute all of booth sixteen’s files to another level.’

  ‘The woman who originally gave you the micro file?’

  ‘Yeah. I haven’t seen her since. It’s as if she simply disappeared.’ Laura briefly closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘So when can we go?’

  ‘There are a few things we need to discuss first. Let’s meet up tomorrow, in person’—Bill noticed a change in Laura’s expression—‘What?’

  ‘How am I going to leave Earth without being noticed?’ she said, pressing her palm to her forehead. ‘They scrutinised my whereabouts when my mother broke her back not that long ago. They may not be as interested in me anymore, but a trip to another planet is bound to set off alarm bells. And what about you?’

  ‘The ITF haven’t checked up on me much. They’re keeping me away from the office and Simon is deliberately giving me very little to do.’ Since Anton’s capture, Simon Shaw’s rare calls coupled with the lack of attention Laura was also getting seemed to confirm his theory: that the World Government and the ESC were preoccupied with the Indigene. ‘What about using your mother again? Couldn’t she take another unfortunate tumble or something?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I injure my own mother to get out of work?’ Laura said pretending to be shocked, her lips curling into a smile in spite of her efforts to look serious.

  ‘Well, if you want to go that far that’s fine,’ Bill said mockingly. ‘Or you could simply lie.’

  Laura paused then shook her head. ‘They’ll only check up on her. I’ll be found out in minutes. What other ideas have you got?’

  But Bill refused to give up on the idea. ‘Can’t you find someone to alter your request form? You must have some leverage in the ESC.’

  Laura nodded slowly as she processed an idea. ‘That might actually work. But we still have the little problem of the ESC monitoring my whereabouts and the ITF yours.’

  Reluctantly Bill had to agree. Just because the government’s interest in them seemed to have died down didn’t mean they weren’t watching them at all; a
trip to another planet would set off alarm bells. But then he remembered that Stephen hadn’t just left Bill with the communication stone—he’d also given him a dozen replicated identity chips, like the ones he and Anton had used to travel to Earth.

  ‘Stephen gave me some identity chips before he left,’ he said. ‘We could create doppelgängers of ourselves.’

  Laura stared at the screen for a moment. ‘What chips?’ she said eventually, clearly taken aback. She straightened up, her posture suddenly tense. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d have any reason to use them,’ Bill said flatly. ‘I expected us to find Anton and for Stephen to get in contact long before now. It wasn’t necessary for you to know.’

  Laura was suddenly angry. ‘Not necessary, Bill? I thought we’d reached an understanding. You said we were in this together. That means keeping me in the loop on everything. I can’t protect you if you start playing the lone crusader!’

  Bill suddenly felt small. ‘Sorry,’ he said, his head bowed. ‘Force of habit. I’ve trouble trusting others. And I don’t need protecting. I don’t want you risking your life for me.’

  ‘Well, it’s about time you started to trust me. And you have my protection even if you don’t want it,’ Laura said, sounding more hurt now than annoyed. She took a deep breath before continuing. ‘So what do we need to do with the chips?’

  ‘I’ve a contact who should be able to help us deactivate our ID chips. Stephen said the replicated version would only work if our originals are inactive. But before we get into that, we’re going to need a pilot to write us into the Exilon 5 passenger ship’s manifest and actually take us to the ship—someone we can trust who won’t ask any questions.’

  ‘What about your contacts? Can’t you pull in some more favours?’